Automated installation of Microsoft SharePoint 2016

Most SharePoint professionals today understand the importance of an automated installation and configuration of SharePoint servers and farms. The need to ensure consistency not only across server in a farm, but across multiple farms in larger environments and even across environments (development, build, test, pre-production an production) is evident and growing with the onboarding of business critical applications, and the implementation of SharePoint as a service platform in the enterprise.

Now with Microsoft SharePoint 2016 coming out soon (beta 2 release just last week) several companies I work with are evaluating SharePoint 2016 for future upgrades, especially with the ability to control the complexity of a platform that eventually will span on-premise and cloud services – governance of a true hybrid platform.

For those who are in that position, I want to point to what is almost the de facto standard for automating SharePoint installation these days. The Auto SP Installer tool, developed by Brian Lalancette . Thousands af SharePoint people around the world have saved hundreds of hours using this tool and if you are evaluating SharePoint 2016 you will be glade to know that ASPI is already available in a version that works with SharePoint 2016.

In the websites (found at autospinstaller.com) you can find the latest updates on how SharePoint 2016 is supported and I have learned that Brian have now joined the Microsoft team, and therefore (if he wants it or not) the expectations for his tool-set os even higher. Brian tells us that he have been able to build the scripts to support the latest bits and that’s a good thing in this evaluation phase.

Even if you feel that AutoSPInstaller is not covering everything in every detail you need, you will learn – using it – that you can customize it with what you need and save time and money installing and configuring SharePoint, and when it gets to aligning environments across the service, you will just not be able to stop smiling. (Given that you have the right procedures in place)

In one of my projects we are looking at integrating ASPI or a similar licensed tool with Octopus (an enterprise deployment platform for .NET). I will let you know how it turns out when we get more into this early in 2016.